


soft confidence

by DetectiveJoan



Category: The Far Meridian (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Memory Chalk, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-04 01:44:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20462990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: “Hey Peri,” Benny says. “Long time no see.”He’s sitting in the middle of the circle, criss-cross-applesauce.Peri sits in front of him. “You know, I am really starting to think we were mislead on how this chalk works.”





	soft confidence

The trade-off to the lighthouse staying still for twice as long is that Peri travels to half as many places. That’s less ideal in her search for Ace, obviously, but it also puts a damper on her more immediate—and, she had presumed, more easily achieved—goal of finding a phone to call Ruth on.

In the two weeks since leaving her, Peri has landed in a tundra, a rainforest with trees taller than the lighthouse, a desert where she met a very kind man who made her some very bad tea, another desert where she had met no one at all, a ghost town, an island populated by lemurs who did not understand personal space, and finally a swamp so murky Peri isn’t immediately convinced that leaving the lighthouse is a great idea. 

She sits down on the front stoop and sighs. 

“At this rate, I’ll run out of groceries before I land somewhere with electricity again,” she says. 

“Be honest,” she scolds herself in a funny voice. “You’re more worried about finding a phone than about finding a store.” 

“Of course I am!” she replied. “What if I never land in civilization again? What if that was my only chance to find Ruth and I messed it up by not making her come with me? What if I never get to talk to her again? Will she think I don’t actually want to call her? Will she forget about me?” 

“She wouldn’t do that,” Funny Voice assures her. 

“Easy for you to say, Mr...I don’t even know who I’m supposed to be talking to.” Peri scrubs her face with her hands. “This is stupid. I’m being stupid. If I want to talk to her so bad, I can just go talk to her.” 

She marches back inside, yanks the chalk out of the kitchen drawer, and gets to drawing a circle in the middle of the living room floor before she can talk herself out of it. As she draws, Peri concentrates on remembering what Ruth had looked like the last time Peri had seen her: her hands stuffed into the pockets of her bomber jacket, natural curls spring up in a halo around her head, her dark eyes shining like her stolen stars in the gathering fog, her full lips—

“Hey Peri,” Benny says. “Long time no see.” 

He’s sitting in the middle of the circle, criss-cross-applesauce. 

Peri sits in front of him. “You know, I am really starting to think we were mislead on how this chalk works.”

“You’re not happy to see me?” he teases. 

“What? No, I definitely am. Believe me, Benny, I miss you so much. It’s just that—”

“You were expecting Ruth.”

Peri fiddles with the chalk. “Yeah.” 

“Maybe you didn’t actually want to see her?” Benny suggests gently. “Maybe the chalk built me instead because you’re not ready to talk to her again.” 

“That is...ridiculous. Of course I’m ready to talk to Ruth again. I’ve been waiting weeks for the lighthouse to land somewhere with a phone so I can call her.”

“Maybe the lighthouse doesn’t think you’re ready either,” he shrugs.

“The lighthouse doesn’t think anything. It’s a lighthouse.”

Benny laughs gently. “It is hard to keep up with you sometimes, Peri. You can be best friends with a candle, but the magic traveling lighthouse you live in can’t have an opinion on your dating life?”

“I’m best friends with you, dummy, not Mo.” She flicks the chalk across the floor at him, and there’s suddenly a lump in her throat. When she looks up, his smile is sad. “Benny—”

“No,” he cuts her off. “You should save your apologies for the real me.”

“But what if I don’t find you again?” 

“Then I’ll find you,” he answers simply. “But that’s not what I’m here for now.” 

“What are you here for?”

“To talk about Ruth, I guess. What are you going to say when you get to talk to her again?” 

“Whatever comes to mind?”

Benny shifts his weight. “Say you wake up tomorrow morning right next to a payphone. You put in a quarter, dial her number. She picks up and says hello. Then you say…?” 

“I say…” Peri frowns. “I don’t know. But you know what? I don’t need to know. It used to be that I had to rehearse conversations with myself before I left the lighthouse. I’d go back and forth trying to guess everything that could possibly happen, and how I could respond to it. But it’s not like that now. And it’s never been like that with Ruth.”

She pauses, but Benny cocks his head to the side like he’s waiting for her to say more so she does. 

“I’ve spent so much time over the years obsessing and remembering and replaying everything I said to her before, trying to figure out how I screwed it up and how I could’ve done better. I thought deep down that if I had planned it out better, maybe I wouldn’t have said or done whatever it was that made her leave. But that’s not true. Leaving was Ruth’s decision. I couldn’t have changed that.” Peri swallows. “It takes two people to have a relationship, and I can’t be responsible for her half. All I’m responsible for is being present and being honest and being myself, because I know she wants to be with me. That should be enough.”

Everything feels too quiet when she stops talking. Benny looks sad again. He carefully reaches out of the circle and takes her hand, lacing their fingers together. 

He’s surprisingly solid, considering.

She asks, “Did you want to be with me?”

He says, “Yes.” 

She takes his other hand. “Because I wanted to be with you. I still want to be with you.” 

“I know. But sometimes people want more than one thing at a time, and they have to make decisions about which things to go after and which things they can trust to still be there when they get back. Like how you trusted Ruth enough to leave her."

He squeezes her hand and looks at her through his lashes with so much sincerity in his eyes it makes her heart twist.

"I wish you hadn't left."

"I know," he says. “But do you think you could trust me like that, Peri?” 


End file.
